


Too Slow Now

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 21:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU following the end of episode 6.05, ‘Invasion’. </p><p> <i>She scrunches the scrap of paper deep into her fist; lets the folded corners bruise her palm as he walks passed her without word, just the trail of his fingertips across the length of her shoulder blades as she’s stock still beneath his touch.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Slow Now

_Just remember who I am in the morning..._

 

She's halfway through her second attempt at a note when he walks in. When he catches her in the act of breaking up with him.

Of breaking his heart.

(Hers; well and truly broken already.)

She scrunches the scrap of paper deep into her fist; lets the folded corners bruise her palm as he walks passed her without word, just the trail of his fingertips across the length of her shoulder blades as she’s stock still beneath his touch.

Later, much later, she'll think about why. About why she chose the locker room for this. About why now. About why not tomorrow. 

Why not next week.

And about how, maybe, she’d planned on being caught all along.

 

 

 

 _I love you_ , he says, nervous. 

(He’s always nervous now.)

She knows without needing to think that these are not words he offers easily. She also knows that he means them with everything that he has.

He doesn't understand her, not at the moment, but he does love her.

And maybe that's enough. 

Maybe that's all she needs for now.

 _I know,_ she says, nods, lowers her lashes so he can’t see her tears. 

( _I (think I) love you too..._ )

The unfinished goodbye is still balled in her fist.

 

 

 

She makes her way towards the hospital’s exit. And she’s done this before, she recognises, walked this path for the last time. 

(All that’s missing; a fairy tale party dress and a best friend...)

But there are fingers twisted securely through hers. A tether, like maybe he knows how close she came to running; like she still might be planning to do just that on the other side of the sliding glass doors.

Is she? 

She doesn’t quite know…

There’s no gathered crowd to see her off. Just obscurity.

And Alex.

 

 

 

He apologises to her once. He apologises to her a thousand times.

_I'm sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

She tells him he has nothing to be sorry for; her fingers in his hair and the bridge of her nose pressed hard against the stubble on his chin. Figures, the more times she says it, the more likely it is that she'll start to believe it.

Whether it’s the truth or not; no longer the point.

(She almost says it back once, twice, but she knows he won’t understand why, and she doesn’t have the energy required to explain it all.

She says nothing.)

 

 

 

He’s at work when she packs a bag. When she retrieves the note she abandoned weeks ago and attempts to flatten out the folds.

Gets in her car and thinks Chicago.

Or Anchorage.

Or Iowa City.

(He’ll never look for her there after all.)

But she’s tried this before; the reality of running is always so much heavier than her imagination can conjure. 

 

 

 

In the end she goes nowhere.

 

 

 

 _I don’t know how to do this_ , she says.

(But not out loud.)

_I don’t know how to be this girl. The one covered in scars that ache._

_The one that should feel grateful and happy and lucky._

_The one who gets to live but always seems to lose everything in the end anyway._

 

 

 

Six months tick over. There are doctor’s appointments and job interviews and the endless nothing that exists between the two.

It’s into these spaces that she falls. An endless, tumbling abyss where he is forever just out of reach despite the constant pressure of his hand in hers; hot and too heavy.

Everything is heavy at the moment, not just his hand.

(Especially his hand.)

 

 

 

The note she started, stopped, held onto all those calendar pages ago, burns a hole in her resolve. And she wonders, absently, if the amount of resisting it takes to push past the ache, _to stay_ , makes her stronger or weaker in the end.

As if it matters...

(It is the only thing that matters.)

The page has thinned, has softened from constant touch. She trails her way over the lines, loops the pad of her fingertip along the curves and careful punctuation points.

Closes her eyes and reads. The words, etched; an integral part of who she is.

Of who she isn’t. 

 

 

 

He loosens. She can see the shadows falling away, piece by piece, as he forgets for moments at a time that she left him once.

That she might do it again.

She loves him; she loves him for trusting her just enough.

(She hates herself for letting it happen.)

 

 

 

The dust seems to settle.

Or maybe she’s just settling into the dust.

(The difference is difficult to detect in the half-light.)

He kisses her goodnight and good morning and they are the high points of her day.

 

 

 

She laughs once, at nothing really, and he stops, stilled by the sudden noise. 

_I’d forgotten,_ he says, in awe for a moment, _I’d forgotten what it sounds like when you do that._

She tilts her head back and does it again just to prove that she can. Tosses her curls and rolls her eyes like he’s being dramatic and silly and weird.

Like she doesn’t have a single clue what he’s talking about.

(Like the reverberation doesn’t echo in her bones, too; wholly unfamiliar.)

 

 

 

The shift back towards centre is a gradual one. 

They head to Portland for a long weekend.

Spend lazy Sundays sleeping until noon; legs twined, sweat-stained sheets long since discarded to the floor.

They drink whole bottles of expensive wine for no reason at all, and she contemplates vet. school at three am. Lets him draw her up a list of the pros and cons and doesn’t even flinch when the fact that it’s four hours away gets scrawled into the negatives column.

 

 

 

 _Thank you,_ she says, a whisper of words and breath against his collar bone. He shifts beneath her touch, asleep, warm, solid.

Here.

( _Thank you for everything..._ )

 

 

 

It’s a completely unremarkable day when it happens. 

She’s vacuuming, she thinks, or defrosting the fridge or separating laundry, the details, now utterly unimportant; and she’s got the radio turned on.

Or the television.

Or perhaps it’s from inside her car, where she’s busy cleaning fingerprints from glass or muddy shoe scuffs from worn carpet.

 _Shots have been fired,_ the voice says, and she nods because, _yes_.

And, _of course_.

 

 

 

A machine beeps; rhythmically pushing air into his lungs for him. She’s more than half convinced it is all that is breathing for her, too.

(She doesn’t leave the hospital for three and a half days.)

 

 

 

There’s a letter folded into an envelope and pushed to the very bottom of a box.

On the fourth day she retrieves it. Tears the faded words to scraps of confetti that fall at her feet, that shift and swirl in the late afternoon breeze.

She doesn’t bother to re-read it first.

She doesn’t need to.

 

 

 

(It had told the story of a girl she once knew. Of a girl who, against even the harshest of odds, got to live.

And of a girl who still managed to lose everything in the end anyway.)

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author's Note |** To lostalongthewayy on youtube. I have no idea who you are; but you are 100% the inspiration for this fic. Which is probably not at all what you intended when you made that fanvid...
> 
>  
> 
> __  
> [where have you gone? the beach is so cold in winter here and where have i gone? i wake in montauk with you near](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvdT_wCJ94I)  
> 


End file.
